By autumn they were engaged, and Leventhal’s success amazed him. He felt that the harshness of his life had disfigured him, and that this disfigurement would be apparent to a girl like Mary and would repel her. He was not entirely sure of her, and, in fact, something terrible did happen a month after the engagement. Mary confessed that she found herself unable to break off an old attachment to another man, a married man. In the pain of the moment, Leventhal almost lost his power to speak. He looked at her — they were in a restaurant. Then he asked if she had gone on seeing this man during the engagement. She said that she had and only at that moment seemed to realize how serious the matter was. He started to leave, and when she tried to hold him back, he pushed her, and she lost her footing in the booth and fell. He helped her rise; her mouth had gone white, and she averted her eyes from him. They left the restaurant together — she even waited while he paid the check — but outside they instantly separated without speaking.
About two years later she sent him a friendly letter. He did not know how to reply. It stood on his dresser for more than a month, confronting him nightly and overriding all his other concerns. He was still deliberating when he received a second letter from her. In it she asked him directly to consider how harassed she had been; she admitted that she had tried to end her infatuation by becoming engaged to him but that that was not the only reason; she had not chosen him indiscriminately. Leventhal found this letter easier to answer. They began to correspond. At Christmas he went down to visit her, and they were married by a justice of the peace in Wilmington.
He had meanwhile moved back to New York, having left Baltimore a few weeks after the engagement was broken. Daniel Harkavy had somehow landed on a trade paper. Leventhal, who had been editing a book of departmental regulations, thought that he, too, could handle that kind of job. He got in touch with Harkavy, and Harkavy wrote back that he was sure he could place him on a paper if he wanted to come to New York. Harkavy had many connections. Leventhal packed his trunk one week end and sent it to Harkavy’s rooming house. He could not bear to stay in Baltimore; he was too wretched. He could not think of it later without flushing and wincing. A man brought up on hardships should have known better than to cut himself adrift. Even then he had realized that it was foolhardy to throw up his job and worse than that to put faith in Harkavy, and he told his chief that he was resigning to take another position. He was ashamed to tell him the truth.
He found Harkavy looking a little different. He was losing his hair and he had grown a red mustache. There was a certain swagger about him; he had taken to wearing large bow ties and black suede shoes. But he was essentially the same. He had written about his connections, but he could think of only one man to call on. This was a middle-aged Kentuckian by the name of Williston, short and ruddy, with a broad head across which his brown hair was brushed with a sort of backwoodsman’s Sunday care. He was one of those people who keep their regional traits after twenty years in New York. It was a cold fall day, and he had an electric heater beside his desk. He sat back in his swivel chair, occasionally raising a foot to warm it over the coils.
No, he said, there was no vacancy in his office. An experienced man might find something even now, in bad times. An inexperienced one didn’t have a chance. Unless by a freak — his shoe shone over the burnished heater — unless he knew someone very influential.
“We don’t,” Harkavy said. “We have no pull. And how will he get experience?”
He wouldn’t suggest, said Williston, that Leventhal try to get a job running copy with a pack of boys at six bucks a week. Even such jobs were scarce. He would suggest that he stick to his trade. Leventhal’s face grew dark, more with self-condemnation than with resentment. He might have asked for a transfer instead of quitting the civil service outright and waited it out, no matter how long it took. He imagined that Williston partly divined what had happened. It stupefied him, what he had done. But, Harkavy was saying, speaking of himself, he had gotten his job by luck, without experience. Oh, no, Williston answered, his father’s name counted for something in the antiques field — Harkavy worked on a paper for auctioneers and antique dealers. “Leventhal was with my father and me for a long time,” Harkavy told him. And Willis-ton lifted his shoulders and gazed into the face of the heater as if to say, “In that case, nothing’s too good for him.” He seemed to regret this when he saw Leventhal’s pained, lowering look. Of course he would do what he could, he said, but he didn’t want them to believe that much could be done. He would phone some people, and meanwhile Leventhal could begin making the rounds.
He began in a spirit of utter hopelessness. The smaller trade papers simply turned him away. The larger gave him applications to fill out; occasionally he spent a few minutes with a personnel manager and had the opportunity to shake someone’s hand. Gradually he became peculiarly aggressive and, avoiding the receptionists, he would make his way into an inner office, stop anyone who appeared to have authority, and introduce himself. He was met with astonishment, with coldness, and with anger. He often grew angry himself. They were frightened, he observed to Harkavy, when you got out of line, out of the proper channel. But the channel led out of the door. How could they expect you to stay in it? He discussed it reasonably enough with Harkavy, but the provocations and near-quarrels continued, and in the heat of these provocations he frequently lost sight of his real object. He might remind himself while shaving or when he entered the bank to draw on his savings that he was after all defeating his own purpose, that anyone who, on an outside chance, had a job to give would not give it to him. But he did not change.
This queer condition lasted for about two months. Then, since Harkavy was becoming increasingly difficult to live with (several nights a week he entertained a woman friend and Leventhal, turned out of the room, went to a movie or sat in a cafeteria), and since his money was running low, Leventhal decided to take any job at all, the next that came his way — he was thinking of trying his old hotel on lower Broadway — when he received a note from Williston asking him to come in. One of his men was sick and had to go to Arizona for the winter, and Leventhal could fill his place till he came back.
So it was through Williston that Leventhal got his start in the profession. He was grateful and worked hard for him, and he discovered he had a knack for the job. From June until the end of summer he was idle again — that, too, was a difficult period. But now he had a season’s experience and he found a place at last with Burke-Beard and Company. Apart from his occasional trouble with Beard, he was satisfied. He was really better off than in the civil service.
He said occasionally to Mary, revealing his deepest feelings, “I was lucky. I got away with it.” He meant that his bad start, his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had somehow combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful (he never forgot the hotel on lower Broadway), the part that did not get away with it — the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.
3
LEVENTHAL’S father-in-law had recently died, and his mother-in-law had been persuaded by the family to give up her house in Baltimore and to live in Charleston with her son. Mary had gone to help her move.
In her absence Leventhal had been eating in an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood. It was in the basement of an old tenement. The stucco walls were almost black. It had a damp, woody smell from the sawdust sprinkled over the plank floor. But it suited him; the meals were cheap, and he generally did not have to wait for a table. Tonight, however, there was only one available. The waiter led him to it. It was in the corner behind a projecting wall which cut off the breeze of the fan. He was about to protest and opened his mouth impatiently, but the waiter, a dark man with thin hair curved over his perspiring forehead, anticipated him with a tired and rather insincere shrug, indicating with a motion of his toweled arm that the place was filled. Leventhal tossed his hat down, moved aside the dishes, and leaned forward on his elbows. Near the kitchen step, the proprietor and his wife were finishing their dinner. She gave Leventhal a look of recognition which he acknowledged, making a stir in his chair. The waiter brought his meal, an omelet in a chipped, blackened enamel dish with tomato sauce hardened on the rim, a salad, and some canned apricots. He ate, and his mood gradually improved. The coffee was sweet and thick; he swallowed even the sediment and put the cup down with a sigh. He lit a cigar. There was no one waiting for the table and he sat awhile, bent backward and puffing, clasping his hands on the densely growing hair on the back of his neck. From the tavern across the way came the slow notes of a guitar, the lighter carried away, the deeper repeated tranquilly.